My first season on the Ice was 1970-71, as a grad student at Ohio State, working on a helicopter-supported project in the Queen Maud Mountains. I came into the Antarctic program just after what I like to think of as the “Post-IGY Heroic Era”. The real Heroic Era had ended with Byrd in the 30’s (you might say earlier than that), and the several expeditions between 1934 and the IGY never touched ground in the Transantarctic Mountains (hereafter the TAM). The Post-IGY Heroic Era was the period when the TAM were mapped in their entirety, both topographically and geologically.

With the onset of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), 1957-58, the U. S. established McMurdo Station, the Kiwis, Scott Base. With the air capability to fly the length of the TAM and land on glaciers in the open field, the U. S. and New Zealand fielded a succession of independent ground parties that systematically mapped at a reconnaissance level both the terrain and the geology. The stories that these guys have to tell should fill a book some day, ought to be in the oral history archives. They completed huge traverses using rickety, primitive snowmobiles, made surveys, collected rocks, mapped contacts, and basically put together the geological history of the TAM. Topographic quadrangles at a scale of 1:250,000 for the entirely of the TAM had been published by the USGS by 1965. In 1969, the year before I got my start, Folio 12 of the Antarctic Map Folio Series was published by the American Geographical Society. It contained geological maps of the entire TAM (as well as all other rocky areas of Antarctica) at a scale of 1:1,000,000. This is the benchmark publication for the geology of the TAM. Essentially the entire map of the TAM had color. Henceforth it has not been a matter of filling in the spaces; it has been a matter of adding detail.

Actually, this is a bit of an overstatement. At the time of the printing of Folio 12 there were in fact two places on the maps that lacked color, at the northern end of northern Victoria Land (hereafter NVL) and a pocket between Axel Heiberg Glacier and Amundsen Glacier. Much of the area from lower Scott Glacier out along the Watson Escarpment to Reedy Glacier was mapped in a dark brown color, which the legend called “Undifferentiated Basement Complex.” Blackburn had been up Scott Glacier in 1933-34 and had noted mostly granite, and a single helo landing had been made on Mt. Webster in 1962-63, where fossil trilobites of Cambrian age had been found in some limestones, but beyond that the lower Scott Glacier and Leverett Glacier areas were uncharted. These unmapped areas were what drew me in the early years of my career.